I've just started using Musicbee to handle my podcasts (I use it for pretty much everything else already!) and I'm a bit surprised to find how limited and problematic the handling is so far - for my tastes anyway. I'd like to suggest some things I think would greatly improve it.
1. Mark podcasts as listened to after syncing - this was asked for a couple of times on the forum but was never commented on. I have limited space on my player (sansa clip 4gb) and syncing all of my 7 podcasts every time I want to sync music takes up unnecessary memory. If there is ANY way for musicbee to recognise when a podcast has been played on another device this would be perfect, but as I doubt there is, an option to mark as read upon sync would be a great alternative.
2. Show the episode title instead of the podcast title - Whenever I check for podcasts I have to click tiny little arrows to see if the title of the episode is one I've listened to. The long list of greyed-out old episodes makes it impractical to leave the options expanded, and the limited view available means I can't see important info when it's collapsed. (This also ties in to what may be a bug where the 'episode date' for every title is always today, when the actual latest show may be days old).
I think either bringing some of the episode information to the fore (without the need for expanding arrows), or even a more elegant solution where you can see the artwork of the show if you only keep the latest (or unplayed) episodes - as if they were single albums or tracks - would make a world of difference. I'm sure everyone would have better ideas on how to do this, and musicbee's handling of podcast and episode information is the worst aspect of it (and easily fixed I think).
(I know you can select an option to hide a lot of greyed out episodes, but this is only upon adding a podcast. It would be nice to have some customisability after adding.)
3. This is more a suggestion than necessary I think, but it would be nice to be able to choose podcasts to sync on the fly, separately from syncing music, without digging within options. The 'send to' option does this well enough, but for something as frequently synced and deleted as podcasts it might be a good idea to have a separate 'sync podcasts' option, where a simple checklist of your shows could be ticked or unticked, and syncing performed exclusively for podcasts.
I know musicbee was never really touted as a podcast handler, but I think so many people are using it for syncing music these days that it makes sense to have some more robust and sophisticated podcast options. Especially as it would only take a few ui adjustments to make it perfectly usable. Right now it's surprisingly weak and clumsy compared to the rest of the program - which is brilliant, of course!